Film

War, Guilt and Forgiveness

Neil McDonald

There is a plot device that often turns up in Hollywood films about Hollywood. The producers want to cut the director’s film. He or his accomplices steal the full version and preview it for the critics, who give the film a rapturous reception. Fantasy? Not really; something like that occurred in 1976 with Marcel Ophuls’s documentary The Memory of Justice. The basis of the film was a book, Nuremberg and Vietnam, by Telford Taylor, one of the American prosecutors at Nuremberg who later investigated US war crimes in Vietnam. Ophuls’s backers came to believe he was spending too much time…